A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste and Difference in India and the United States by Gyanendra Pandey (review)

Prejudice is preconceived opinion, the tacit foundation on which other judgments and courses of action rest; it exists as socially shared, but implicit, common sense. Pandey’s subject is this archive of the unsaid, expressed in the forms of affect and the habits of speech and behavior that authorize and sustain “othering” based on race (in the United States) and on caste (in India). He aims to account for the effects of prejudice understood in two senses—(1) “vernacular” forms, expressed in the stigmatization of particular categories of people, and (2) the “universalist” prejudice of post-Enlightenment modernity, expressed in terms of a rational human subject, which, although represented as unencumbered by specificities of gender, class, caste, or race, occupies a white, masculine positionality.

Pandey’s book examines this dual character of prejudice as it has shaped both Dalits’ (India’s ex-Untouchables) and African Americans’ twentieth-century histories. Both groups are obvious targets of vernacular prejudice; they are also subjected to universalist prejudice, both as it differentiates them from the unmarked modern self and as internalized. Vernacular prejudice is readily identifiable and often (but not always) deplored, whereas universalist prejudice often remains unrecognized in modernist common sense. Moreover, universalist prejudice may work to sustain prejudice within communities victimized by vernacular prejudice, often doubly stigmatizing women.

Pandey joins a growing body of scholars interested in the comparative and transnational circulation of racialized subjects and of race as a category, as well as scholars and activists interested in the specific convergences of African-American and Dalit histories. Pandey’s distinctive contribution rests on his effort to trace the history of how people experienced and resisted prejudice. Although superficially comparative, the work does not aim for the sort of controlled comparison that may be found, for example, in sociology or political science; nor does it offer a conventional chronological narrative. Instead, it proceeds from the recognition of certain commonalities (for example, embodied stigma) in the everyday lives of African Americans and Dalits, as well as the shared expectations about citizenship, equality, progress, and modernity that galvanized both civil-rights struggles in the United States and postcolonial nation-building in India from the 1940s forward.

Characterizing his method as one of juxtaposition, Pandey probes the lived experiences of African Americans and Dalits, drawing principally from personal narratives, memoirs, essays, speeches, works of fiction and expressive culture, sermons, and popular media accounts. Chapters 3 and 4 alternate between African-American and Dalit efforts to escape oppression through direct action and other forms of public, often explicitly political, mobilization. Pandey argues that since these movements are founded on universalist prejudice, they unintentionally reproduce vernacular prejudices in new guises, by, say, consigning them to an entrenched tradition or by implying the uniformity of African-American or Dalit identity. Chapters 5 and 6 move to the more intimate realms of the body and domesticity, showing how the production of personal narratives can help to create a contradictory, multivocal, and embodied identity that contrasts with the unencumbered self reified by universalist prejudice.

Pandey’s arguments rest on the work of feminist and critical race theorists, of scholars of embodiment and affect, and of sociologists and anthropologists schooled in Goffmann’s interactionist approach.¹ This interdisciplinarity, moreover, is aligned with critical historiography. As a distinguished contributor to India’s Subaltern Studies Collective, Pandey has long advocated a historiography of subjugated populations that relies on ephemeral and unofficial source materials. The value of such sources—as also demonstrated during the past four decades by historians of labor, gender and race, public historians, and scholars of popular culture and memory—has prompted the rethinking of the aims and analytical categories of historical research. Accordingly, the defiant note that Pandey strikes regarding his use of personal narratives, folk songs, poetry, and fiction—as opposed to “records and documents emanating from the state”—comes as...